TEARS begin to well in the eyes of Eloy Moran, a retired civil servant, as he
explains what happens when he sees a train. “I can’t control it, I start
trembling, I go like this,” he says, wobbling his hands back and forth to
show how they shake.
Many of the physical wounds have healed but three years after Spain was torn
apart by the worst terror attack in Europe since the Lockerbie disaster,
survivors of the Madrid railway bombings are paying a crippling
psychological price.
This week, 29 people, many of them Moroccan Islamist fanatics, will go on
trial for the atrocity in which 191 people were killed and more than 1,800
injured. Victims will have to relive the horror. “We are doing our best to
help prepare them for the challenge,” said Sira Balanzat, a psychologist
treating survivors such as Moran.
On the morning of March 11, 2004, Moran was on his way to work with no idea
that his working life was over. As his train pulled into a station in
central Madrid, several bombs in backpacks exploded, one of them mangling
the carriage he was travelling in, along with its occupants.
“After that blast I did not want to open my eyes,” said Moran, 58. “I was
afraid of being blind. Or of what I might see.”
He was lifted out of the carriage by a passer-by who has since become a good
friend. “I had cuts, bruises and burns all over my body,” he recalled. “I
lost my left eye. And the hearing in my left ear.”
The injury that put paid to his working life as an office administrator,
however, was not physical. “My personality changed. I had a quick temper. I
couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t even read a newspaper.”
He was obliged to take early retirement. “I had to admit I was incapacitated,”
he said. “It made me very sad. I liked my job very much.”
He meets Balanzat, the psychologist, regularly. “At first I thought I could go
it alone,” he said. “Now I know I need help.”
Balanzat, 29, has not yet been able to cure Moran of his train phobia, but has
helped other patients to overcome their fear by accompanying them on
journeys. “They are constantly on the lookout for people with backpacks,”
she said. “I teach them ways of coping, how to redirect their thoughts.”
The approach of the “trial of the century”, as one Spanish magazine described
it last week, has increased the flow of visitors to her office in the
headquarters of a victims’ association in Madrid. Some of her patients are
people who lost loved ones in the bombings.
On Wednesday evening she sat consoling a woman whose husband had been killed.
“People are afraid of the trial,” she said later. “They are afraid of what
feelings it might inspire — rage, sadness, all sorts of emotions will be set
off by it.”
Balanzat tells them to look at the trial, which will involve hundreds of
witnesses and lawyers for the prosecution and defence, as an opportunity for
discovering the truth.
Some conspiratorially minded Spaniards believe in a link with Eta, the Basque
terror group, a suspicion dismissed by investigators but encouraged by the
then conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar.
He was stung by accusations that the attacks were punishment for his support
of America in the Iraq war and lost power in an election three days after
the bombings because voters suspected him of wanting to blame Eta for purely
political reasons ahead of the polling.
At the time, the public was convinced the attacks were related to the presence
of Spanish troops in Iraq. Today, however, investigators argue that planning
for the bombings began long before the war. The attacks, they maintain, were
related more to exhortations from Osama Bin Laden to revive Al-Andalus, as
Spain’s Muslim kingdom was known in the Middle Ages.
Whatever Bin Laden’s role, victims are clamouring to know who was more
directly involved. “We need to be able to put a face on our executioners,”
said Ange-les Herguedas, a hospital administrator and neighbour of Moran who
used to commute with him to work each day and suffered severe burns, broken
ribs, a punctured lung and perforated ear drums in one of the explosions.
“We need to know what motivated them.”
This has been complicated by the suicide of seven suspects who telephoned
relatives to say goodbye and then used leftover explosives to blow
themselves up after police surrounded their flat in Madrid a month after the
bombings. Two other suspects escaped, one of them eventually dying as a
suicide bomber in Iraq.
Nevertheless, among the 29 accused appearing in the glass “bubble” cage in the
courtroom will be two of the alleged master-minds, including Rabei Osman,
known as “Mohammed the Egyptian”, who is believed to be one of Bin Laden’s
top European lieutenants.
He bragged about organising the Spanish attacks, according to Italian
investigators who intercepted his telephone calls.
Before he was extradited to Spain, Italy sentenced him to 10 years in prison
for recruiting suicide bombers for Iraq. His trial included chilling
evidence that he had tried to encourage a young recruit by showing a video
of the beheading of an American, Nicholas Berg, in Iraq.
“Come nearer, watch closely, this is the politics you have to follow, the
politics of the sword,” Osman told the recruit as the victim’s screams rang
out and Italian detectives listened through bugs planted in the suspect’s
flat. “Go to hell, enemy of God, kill him, kill him, cut it well, cut off
his head.”
Prosecutors have requested a sentence of 38,654 years in prison although the
maximum term in Spain is 40 years.
Two of the others in the dock in Madrid were alleged to have been among the
group that travelled in two vehicles with 13 backpacks of explosives to a
suburban railway station where they boarded various trains at rush hour into
Madrid. Extensive DNA testing has been used to link others with the safe
house in which the bombs were manufactured.
Even so, the proceedings, expected to last until the summer, will expose
embarrassing investigative failings. Many of the accused had been under
police surveillance long before the bombings. “We were taping all of their
conversations,” said a police source last week. “Unfortunately, we didn’t
always listen to all of the tapes.”
As for Moran, he is hoping for answers. “We hope that light will be cast on
the shadows. We want to know exactly how and why our lives were turned
upside down.”
Additional reporting: Graham Keeley
